


Pheromones

by MaleaBotor



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: Classic Tropes which were essentially set up for me by the author, Conveniently Gay, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Written entirely to annoy my teen self, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:04:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaleaBotor/pseuds/MaleaBotor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur's worked it out! It's not FORD he's attracted to. It's just that pheromone thing he does. Obviously, this will be the end of worrying about things and he has no idea why this fanfiction even has to be rated so highly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pheromones

The deer, Arthur thought, made everything make sense. Here he had been, wondering for, well, years, probably, about what exactly it was about Ford Prefect that had him looking past the man’s tendency to run roughshod over Arthur’s life, and it turned out that it was a side effect, probably of Ford trying to get free drinks, if he knew his friend. Which he did, much better now. Pheromone control. How simple, once you knew that was an option. How clear and obvious, now, the drunken evenings with Ford, (or general alcoholic stupors, Ford was very fond of reminding him that his slavish ape-brain adherence to a solar time cycle wasn’t applicable to drinking in space) where he’d found himself blearily appraising Ford’s manic grin and thinking that all in all, he’d quite prefer him to go for _Arthur’s_ throat, maybe, and preferably include his tongue as well. How perfectly explicable, the fact that he’d been staring at Ford’s arse for the last hour of their hike through the frozen wilderness.

It was a relief, frankly, because Arthur had always considered himself something of a man’s man, or rather, not a man’s man but a manly sort of man who liked ladies. (Man’s man was a rather odd phrase when you got right down to it.) Whatever it was, he considered himself that, and it had been frankly too much to consider, on top of all the other things he had to become accustomed to as a space traveler. Just exhausting. Compared to that, adding his knowledge of pheromone control to all of his past Ford-interactions was a breeze. It was so freeing, in fact, that Arthur began to whistle a jaunty sort of tune as they walked along.

“Arthur,” said Ford, after about a minute of this, “not that I don’t appreciate West Side Story but—no, actually, I don’t appreciate West Side Story. Cut it out.” Arthur did. Seconds later, Ford told him, quite rudely, to _double_ cut it out and stick it in a black hole because Arthur had begun humming tunelessly without realising it.

***

That evening, in their camp dug into the side of one of the many hills in the area, Arthur, for once, found himself not stressed and anxious for the night, which, yes, could have had something to do with being well on their way to being able to dress more warmly, to not feel the chill. But more likely, he knew, was that camping tonight would have none of the awkward undertones it had previously been painfully full of, for him. They could just be two chums, weathering out the chilly night together on a beautiful planet, instead of one guy who liked his best friend way too much having to sleep right next to said best friend and possibly even thinking inappropriate thoughts about him—if he had the time, what with his main nightly activity of metamorphosing into the most embarrassed and self-conscious lifeform on the planet. No, now, as he finished his charred hunk of meat and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, he could fearlessly suggest that it was late, and had been a long day, and he was going to go sleep on the synthetic woolen blankets they’d pilfered from the Golgafrinchan ship and, he continued without a hint of awkward blathering, Ford should probably go to sleep too because it was bloody cold without him.

He felt a good deal of smug satisfaction when Ford didn’t give him a suspicious look, or…or anything else he might have done, and instead just said “OK,” and added another few branches to the fire before fishing his towel out of his satchel and folding it into a pillow as always. Brilliant! He’d known he was right. He was just glad it had occurred to him after watching Ford glow with ethereal loveliness a couple of times.

“What’s ‘good’?” Ford suddenly asked him, interrupting his thoughts as they both settled down under the roof of the shelter, only faintly lit in flickering orange under its shadow.

“What?” Arthur blinked sleepily, not quite following Ford’s line of thought. He propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at Ford sideways. “Well, quite a lot of things are good, I suppose. Most of the ones I can come up with offhand exploded with the Earth, but I could still make a fairly decent list if—“

“No, not that. You were muttering to yourself saying ‘good, good, that’s all sorted’ on and on. Are you sure that rabbit we had for lunch was alright? I don’t know what’s got into you, today.”

“Oh,” said Arthur.

“Well,” said Arthur.

“It’s just that I’ve worked it out,” said Arthur when he properly remembered that everything was OK now. He could even tell Ford and they’d have a laugh about it, that’s how OK it was. “I’m not gay, it’s just that you’re using pheromones.”

This, rather than producing the expected chuckle of agreement and understanding, made Ford prop himself up and peer at Arthur, frowning.

“I’m not accusing you of using them to control me,” Arthur hastened to add, “I just mean that you keep using them all the time and catching me on the edges of them, which makes me attracted to you when I’m not meaning to be.”

“Arthur,” said Ford.

“What?” said Arthur, getting a bit irritated now that Ford wasn’t following the script he’d decided upon in his head.

“I rarely use pheromone control,” Ford said, which was so far off the script that Arthur’s brain had to do a bit of jogging to catch up, which left both it and him out of breath, suddenly.

“What?” Arthur repeated, redundantly.

“Well, it’s a bit obvious, isn’t it? And it takes ages to get working. Easier just to do things the old fashioned way, really, in most cases. Like talking a lot, or buying the other person a few drinks, or talking someone into buying their own drinks, and to get me one while they’re at it, which is really what I usually try for.”

“What? But I thought—“ began Arthur, and then stopped, because the self-consciousness had crept up on him again while he was saying “what” a lot and had wrapped itself entirely around his head like some sort of unwanted muffler.

“It’s OK,” said Ford soothingly, “it’s cool. Where’s your copy of the Guide, I think you might need to look at it.”

“It’s not OK! This means I might be gay, Ford!”

“You’re not gay,” soothed Ford. He patted Arthur’s shoulder. “There there. I’ve seen you with all sorts of girls. You just like me as well, which is also cool, seeing as I liked you enough to save you from Earth before it was destroyed, right? Arthur?” Because at this point, Arthur had settled back down onto the towel-pillow and was gently clutching his own head. “Don’t be like that, Arthur. It’s not as if anyone but you cares.”

Arthur stopped going “aaaaaa” very quietly and looked up, sideways, at Ford, wild-eyed. “What do you mean, I’m the only one who cares? It’s not…that’s just not…”

“Well,” Ford said thoughtfully, and stroked his beard with his other hand just as thoughtfully, “Earth is gone, the Golgafrinchans are at least several thousand miles away, _I_ couldn’t possibly care less, and I don’t think it matters much what this planet’s natives think, although I’m sure whatever it is could probably be expressed just as well by someone trying to whisper while being strangled.”

These were all fairly valid points, but Arthur still announced that he needed a moment to think about it or he was going to wake up tomorrow with a headache.

***

A little over a moment later, Arthur had discovered that it was actually impossible to imagine he was kissing a girl when the person involved had a full beard. He had started out seeing if he could pretend he personally just had an extra thick beard but it swiftly proved futile, and if he was being perfectly honest with himself, if he was going to kiss Ford, he didn’t particularly want to pretend he was kissing someone else. It was only that it might have been easier to progress into this ‘maybe not as straight as he had previously assumed’ arrangement if Ford had been clean-shaven but it was difficult to achieve a particularly smooth shave with a stone knife, so beards on both of them would have to do.

“You know,” said Ford, breaking off the kiss, “I was kind of hoping this would happen back when I first rescued you. Only then the Vogons killed the mood I had going and we didn’t really have any free time after that.” Arthur made a face at Ford.

“My home planet and everything I knew had just been destroyed and you thought I’d be up for it?”

“Well, yeah, but I’d rescued _you_ , which is the important part.” Arthur kept making the same face in an attempt to convey just how unimpressed he was by that until Ford hooked a leg over him to pull him closer and kissed him again, at which point it became fairly difficult to keep making it, if only because he was too busy concentrating on remembering to breathe. God. It had been _ages_. It had even been ages before the Earth was destroyed and he became rather too busy to do much of anything besides running from things and trying to teach artificial intelligences how to make tea. Before that, though…well, he just hadn’t met the right girls in pubs, he supposed. But this was very nice, if a bit sudden, too nice for him to bother putting much more effort into thinking about whether this ruined his self-image or something in that vein, and if he was going to stomp all over the way he’d viewed himself for years, then it might as well be with someone like Ford, who was a good friend he could usually trust with a great arse into the bargain.

“Ah!” Arthur yelped when Ford abruptly slipped his very cold hand into Arthur’s pants and closed it around his cock, which had been getting interested but got quite a bit less interested at the prospect of trying to function while actively being frozen.

“Shh, it’s OK, I know what I’m doing,” said Ford, who did, in fact—quite well, actually—but hadn’t had the chance before to exercise this knowledge while underdressed in a winter landscape. He moved his hand, finally, which at least created a bit of friction and made Arthur curl in a bit, tucking his head down and panting into Ford’s shoulder. It was really, really lovely, but he only had one pair of trousers, pajama or no, and he told Ford this. “Fair point,” Ford admitted, “and it’s a bit cold for a wash. Hold on, I’ll handle it.”

‘Handling it’ apparently meant shuffling his way down beneath the blanket, tugging down Arthur’s pajama trousers, and sucking his cock with such sudden enthusiasm that Arthur made a noise not unlike the native inhabitants of the planet and clutched at the blanket and Ford’s shoulder both. “Oh God,” he moaned, “oh God, fuck. Have you— Is—” Instead of continuing to try to talk, he lifted the blanket slightly to look at the shadow of Ford, lit very slightly at the edges by what light from the fire could make it in. It was mesmerising to see that hint of Ford’s lips around him, and a little weird with beard scratching at his thighs, and a very warm contrast to the cold air he was letting in. He thought for a moment that he wouldn’t have wanted to do that, with how rarely they bathed now—and then thought that there couldn’t possibly be anything worse there than a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Aliens. Bloody…aliens.

Groaning as Ford did something particularly brilliant with his mouth, he dropped the blanket, panting hot clouds of vapour into the air. Ford patted him comfortingly again on his hip while doing an impossible thing with his throat that he’d probably learned off yet another mystical sect in his travels. Arthur was sure Ford would have told him if he wasn’t otherwise occupied. Sliding his hands down and along to sink fingers into Ford’s hair, Arthur wondered for the hundredth time what exactly was going on with his life. At that point, Ford did some third, intense, alien thing with his tongue and Arthur gasped, fingers clenching as something that felt like some sort of orgasmic explosion…happened, and he came helplessly into Ford’s mouth in a moment where his vision blurred and everything tasted oddly purple.

“Well,” he slurred, three minutes or so later, when Ford had made his way back up to Arthur’s level, wiping his beard, lying on his back beside him. “That was quite lovely. Very, very nice.”

Ford gave him a look and said: “I might have gone a little heavy on the telepsychic overtones,” to which Arthur nodded and did his best to look like he knew what Ford was talking about.

“Oh, hang on,” said Arthur after another minute, “I didn’t, er, you’re still…”

“I’m still,” Ford agreed, and Arthur took a deep breath to steady himself before looping his arm under Ford and around his shoulders, turning to pull himself flush, and reaching down into Ford’s trousers with the other hand. It was fairly relieving to find exactly what he would have expected to be there, and even more relieving with how exhausted he felt that it didn’t take long before Ford was pressing his nose into Arthur’s hair and shuddering in his grasp. Wiping his hand off on the blanket, Arthur shifted enough to get his trousers back on while Ford sighed and turned around so that he lined up, magnificent arse flush against Arthur’s body. It was very warm under their minimal covering now, and obviously, it was, er, sound tactically as well to do this on a regular basis to prevent chills and so forth. A very good realisation—much better, really, than the one from this morning, and there was nobody beyond the two of them to mind.

“I wonder if the Golgafrinchans have got around to reinventing any form of smithing yet,” Ford muttered thoughtfully. “I could do with something to render all this deer fat.”

“Hm?”

“Never mind. I’m just thinking out loud.”

**Author's Note:**

> When I was a teenager, I used to write long, ranting essays about why Ford/Arthur was impossible. Once I stopped being a teenager, I realised I was a dumbass, and made a promise to myself that I would write some porny Ford/Arthur just in case I ever time travelled and was therefore required to gross out my younger self.
> 
> This was the result.


End file.
